ouij

Resolved:  If I am ever in a position of authority, and an underling gives me a spreadsheet that contains no mathematical operations or numerical data, I will at minimum have him fired, and, ideally, have him flayed and his bleeding carcass displayed from a gibbet above my door, bearing the legend: I DID NOT USE THE PROPER TOOL FOR THE JOB.

I am convinced that, in most offices, spreadsheets are used in three ways: 

1. Actually performing mathematical calculations on numerical datasets.  Even though this is the whole reason why this particular piece of software actually came to be, it is probably the least widespread use of the technology.
2. Collecting data--e.g., addresses--.  This is far more common.
3. Displaying text in a tabular format.  If I had to guess, I would say that 99 percent of all spreadsheet files currently in existence are nothing more than text in a tabular format.

I have never understood why so many people insist on using spreadsheet applications--e.g., Excel-- to display text.  There are other packages on your computer that can display text in a more sane way. 

What I understand less is people pretending that they're organized by dumping data into an Excel spreadsheet--and then not doing any data processing on the sheet at all.  If you're keeping, say, addresses, a spreadsheet is probably the worst way to do it.  You really should be using a real database--that way you can run useful queries over your data set, and sort the information you want in the way you want it for the reason you want to use it.

It has been pointed out to me that Excel, for its part, has a number of excellent text-formatting features.  This may be so, but the only reason that the program has bloated to include those features is because people see grid lines on screen and treat the spreadsheet as if it were a physical, tangible piece of graph paper.  

This is one of the most glaring examples, to my mind, of why WYSIWYG isn't all it's cracked up to be.  A less "cuddly" user environment might actually have nudged people into using the right tool for each job.  But instead, we end up with a blank sheet of graph paper, and users just doodle on it.  That'd be fine, except that they have very definite ideas what that doodle should be--ideas which have little or nothing at all to do with the designed function of the software.  So developers have to bloat otherwise good software with needless complexity to satisfy the myriad demands of their users--who could have made life easier for themselves by stopping to think whether they were using the right tool for the job in the first place.  A framing hammer and a pipe wrench are both heavy tools, and I suppose I could hammer a nail with a pipe wrench if I had nothing else--but I'd be a damn fool to do it, if I knew I had a hammer handy.

"Hey, ouij, I need you to make some copies for me."

"Sure thing, boss. What's up?"

"Copy each of these six filings once. Make sure they're clean. Then, prepare this filing." hands me ransom-note cut-and-paste draft of filing.

"Uh, boss, we already filed these papers electronically. . . "

"They shrink when we scan them or whatever it is. I don't want them shrunk. I want them full-size. I don't want to hear about the electronic copies. Don't even think about going that direction. Copy the papers, make the filing, OK?"

Never mind, of course, that the clerk will likely refuse our filing. The rules in this particular forum specifically say that all electronic filings should also be machine readable (that is, text-readable/searchable). That means OCR (which is a pain in the ass) or print-to-PDF (much MUCH better!). But apparently, print-to-PDF is not good enough for the boss, and he wants PDFs of our paper copies. Fine.

Except that the paper copies are PRINTOUTS OF THE PDFS THAT I FILED IN THE FIRST PLACE, which were, by the way, text-searchable, and thus in compliance.

I'm wondering whether or not to remind the boss that we are about to make a non-compliant filing, or to let the clerk do it.

Took babybro to the Wizards game after work. Snagged some good
seats--it's a birthday celebration, after all. The look on his face was
totally worth it. I love being kuya.

Watching Gil and the Wiz thump the Timberwolves mostly erased my office
aggro, but just so there's some sort of record, I'm going to describe
it.

The Superior Court for the District of Columbia has decreed that
henceforth (actually, since last week), all filings in civil matters
were to be electronic. To prepare us lowly support staff peons for this
change, our management prepared a series of training sessions for the
new ECF system that we were to attend or else. The first two
sessions were supposed to be quite good--a teleconference with someone
in charge of ECF, a PowerPoint presentation, and all the rest of it.
But those of us who had better things to do last week--you know, like
our jobs--passed on the first two sessions, leaving them for
people whose attorneys regularly filed papers in D.C. Superior Court.

No problem, management assured us. We'll prepare video training
sessions for you. Today was one such video training session.

I'll leave aside, for the moment, the usual rant about how
technologically-allergic many of my colleagues seem to be.

Anyway, management is not technologically allergic. They
couldn't be, since they arranged such a nice video training session for
us, right? Except that instead of actually talking to someone who knew
anything about audiovisual presentation, they went with the easy way
out: they simply pointed a camcorder at the screen during the
first (live) training session, and hit RECORD. So
where the original training session had high-quality images--which,
incidentally, were provided to us all via e-mail last week, the
video training session showed a mostly unreadable screen with heavily
distorted sound.

Since the screen was illegible, we were forced to go with the sound.
Other people were taking diligent notes, but since we had already been
provided with the PowerPoint slides, there wasn't much point--the slides
spoke for themselves. Most of us realized this, and began to drift off.
When I awoke with a start, the tape was still droning interminably on,
and most of the people in the training session were asleep.

Then, abruptly, it stopped.

The genius whose idea it was to point the camcorder at the
original screen in the first place had forgotten to plug the camcorder
into the wall at the start of this session. We had been running on
batteries which were now exhausted. It took two people to figure this
out. By this point, my soul had left my body to find something exciting
or at least productive to do, leaving me in inert anomie as someone else
called the guy who set up the training session back in. The genius
returned with the AC adaptor, but spent another ten minutes figuring out
where and how to plug the same adaptor in, and subsequently how to turn
on the camera. He managed to turn on the camera, finally, but in
"Camera" rather than "Playback" mode.

The camera, which had been hooked up to the conference room a/v stack,
briefly showed us sitting there passively before the air was rent by a
piercing shriek. Yes, the volume on the speakers was turned all the way
up, and genius pointed the camera--and thus its
microphone--right into the speakers, unleashing that beatiful
fingers-on-a-dusty-chalkboard sound of feedback.

Finally, the show was back on the road. More dozing. "Are there any
questions?" the tape asked.

I didn't stick around to find out.

. . . sucks ass. I mean, it really sucks ass. Why should I be compelled to sit through an hour of useless powerpoint presentations with a total information content of five minutes?

Because my co-workers are computer illiterates. Electronic case filing in the D.C. Superior Court is not complicated. We received TFM(tm) in our e-mail boxes last week. A simple notice of how that jurisdictions rules differ from the Federal courts would have been enough. We're all grown-ups. We know how to read, right?

Wrong. Management wants you to sit through a mandatory ECF training session, wasting half your afternoon.

From where I sit, I hear the rattle and hum of an IBM Selectric 2 typewriter--one drone that never really came to terms with the computer.

Why do we waste money on giving these people full-powered desktops when thin clients would do the same job for less power and greater security?

Baa, baa black sheep, have you any wool?
"Yes, sir; yes, sir, three bags full:
"One for the Master and one for the Dame
"And One for the little boy who lives down the lane."

This is my life at work. I move piles of paper to and fro. Occasionally, I move them hither and yon. The cruel twist is that I am supposed to be living in the age of the paperless office. We are being buried by mounds of needless paper.

I am supposed to report the receipt of PTO Office Actions and to our clients, forwarding those same Office Actions, along with any references cited therein.

Along the way, I am supposed to make copies: two copies each of the reporting letter (one for the case file, one for the chron); and two copies each of all the references (one to the client, one to the case file, and one to destinations unknown and unknowable). Here's the rub: all of these references are available electronically, whether from the USPTO themselves or any number of online databases. The firm has just spent a small fortune on extra structural steel to bear the accumulated weight of our paper patent files--weight that might have been saved if I didn't have to make redundant copies of easily-available documents.

Even though I work with IP attorneys, who are, theoretically at least, in the "Technology" practice group of this firm, I have yet to deal with a group of people who are so adamantly averse to the actual use of information technology in practice. There is always at least one IBM Selectric rattling away typing labels--because the secretary in question refuses to learn how to use the label-printing function in her word processor. We are constantly making redundant paper copies of everything. And, worse, our clients refuse to deal in anything but paper or facsimile. Correspondence that could have been sent at zero cost via e-mail is sent at considerable cost via international direct dial fax. Some agents or clients have no e-mail access at all.

I don't know how representative my experience is, but I'm constantly amazed at the lack of openness to computers & IT.

An anonymous informant who works in the IT industry submitted this e-mail, which he received from his IT Service Desk.:

From: Service Desk
Sent: Friday, September 01, 2006 10:53 AM
To: All
Subject: Critical notification!



Summary: Last night our Anti-virus software vendor released a signature update that incorrectly identified a critical Windows system component as a virus.



Service Impacted: None, as long as *no* production Windows systems are rebooted until further notice.



Description: While no virus infections actually took place, this may have left several production systems in a potentially unstable state due to the deletion of the incorrectly flagged file. It is critical that *no* production Windows systems are rebooted until further notice. We are working with the vendor to resolve this issue as quickly as possible & appreciate your patience and cooperation.



Contact Instructions: Please contact the Service Desk if you have any questions or concerns.

Thank you,

Service Desk


So there you have it. Windows updates *are* viruses.

My office just migrated to WindowsXP. It's really fun watching a whole bunch of 12:00 users being confronted with new software.

Basic functionality has not changed; all that has changed, for most users, is the look...and yet people are utterly baffled. Considering the amount of confusion this is generating, I wonder if it might not be equally difficult/easy to migrate to an entirely new Operating Systemm, like, say Ubuntu.

That's not to say that we don't use *nix here in the office. At least some workstations (in the IT department) have multiboot-capable bootloaders, which boot Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris.

Amusingly, I am not very badly affected. My "home" folder--whatever Windows calls ~/ and ~/Desktop-- has been migrated as well, so my puTTY and WinVi are still there.

Of course, I wish that I could run cygwin. Apparently, with Cygwin, I can fully GNOME-ify my desktop...but I'm fairly sure that the IT guys would kill me if I did that.

The downside to the increasing popularity of Linux has meant an influx of "Blinking 12:00" users, who have neither the capacity nor the desire to learn anything new. Some even threaten legal action on community boards when they hose their installs.

These are presumably the same people who argue with soundboards of Schwartzie soundbites.

There are people who believe that e-mail is a magical extension of the Telex...and require hard copies of every single e-mail.

I can understand the desire to hard-copy things for archive...but for someone to eschew electronic reading utterly in this day and age......[APOSIOPESIS]